The Imminent Rise of Social Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the distribution of services like information storage and processing as if they were utilities, rather like electricity sold over a power grid. The idea is that people use and pay for only as much as they need.

But one problem with this model is trust. How can users be sure that all the nodes in the cloud can be trusted, that there aren’t some nodes that are malicious? Such nodes might disrupt information processing tasks by refusing to co-operate or by sending back false data, for instance. Today, Abedelaziz Mohaisen and pals at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis suggest a fix. They say one solution is to distribute tasks only to people you trust, as defined by your social network.